March 2017

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This Week In Cinemas — February 01, 2017

Love is local. Monsters are Foreign.

by Philbert Dy

Love is local. Monsters are Foreign.

This week: another pretty eclectic batch of films, as is usually the case in these early months of the year, where the people are still reeling from having spent so much money over the holidays. It is in this space, though, that smaller local films tend to find their way into cinemas, and this week we have two very different visions of Filipinos feeling things.

Local Releases:

A heartbroken young woman (played by Alessandra de Rossi) finally ventures out of her flat in order to go on a journey of self-discovery. She travels all over the country, trying to track down the mysterious sender of a series of hand painted postcards with messages of love on them. Somehow this doesn’t end with her being murdered. This film opened last year at the CineFilipino film festival, and practically sold out every screening. Because the local cinema business makes very little sense, it’s having its commercial run nearly a year later. Check out our review at The Neighborhood.

Ed Lejano, now likely best known as the face of QCinema, returns to directing with this film about a bunch of people living in an apartment complex who deal with the various entanglements that come out of using a Tinder-like app. Press materials indicate that there will be a dark turn, but we would just be as satisfied with ninety minutes of footage of Maria Isabel Lopez using Tinder. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Foreign Releases:

Bryan Cranston is an overprotective dad asking the titular question to his daughter, who happens to be dating a wealthy tech mogul played by James Franco. One certainly understands that James Franco may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the answers seem to be self-evident.

The final chapter! So many questions! How many chapters have there been? What happened in the last chapter again? Does anyone remember? Didn’t Milla Jovovich’s character already die in one of these movies already? What’s left to resolve? Is this really the final chapter, or will there be more if this movie makes the expected return on its relatively modest budget? We’re betting on the latter. Watch out for Resident Evil: Even Finaler in a couple of years.

Asa Butterfield plays the first human being born and raised on Mars. He travels to Earth to look for his father, who knocked up his mother right before the fateful trip to Earth. It turns out, however, that being raised on Mars has had an effect on his physiology, and he might not be able to survive a prolonged stay on Earth. He gets to hang out with a pretty girl, though. On the downside, he might have to listen to some Dave Matthews.

Alien, oil-guzzling creatures hide inside trucks. They’re MONSTER TRUCKS. Get it? Lucas Till stars as a troubled teenager from a broken home who befriends one of these creatures, and together, they take on an evil oil corporation for some reason.

Jackie Chan returns to the genre that made him famous: goofy action films that offer plenty of risk of him hurting himself. Presumably, this is why yoga is built directly into the film, so that the aging stuntman superstar will be able to rehabilitate his joints while he puts himself into all manner of peril.

Special Engagments:

There’s still another week of screenings of Saving Sally, Sunday Beauty Queen, Seklusyon, and Valor: The Legacy of Col. Emmanuel V. De Ocampo. Catch a movie while you mull over buying a copy of Fifty Shades Darker in preparation for the movie next week.